Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (32 page)

America has a habit of not taking responsibility for its own actions. Instead, it habitually looks for a high moral pretext for inaction. I was in Durban at the 2001 World Conference Against Racism when the United States walked out of it. The Durban conference was about major crimes of the past, such as racism and xenophobia. I returned from Durban to New York City to hear Condoleezza Rice—President Bush’s national security advisor—talk about the need to forget slavery because, she said, the pursuit of civilized life requires that we forget the past. It is true that unless we learn to forget, life will turn into revenge seeking. Each of us will compile a catalog of wrongs done to a long line of ancestors and nurse these as grievances. But civilization cannot be built just on forgetting. Not only must we learn to forget, we must also not forget to learn. We must also memorialize crimes that are monumental. America was built on two monumental crimes: the genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of African Americans. The United States tends to memorialize other peoples’ crimes, not its own—to seek a high moral ground as a pretext to ignore real issues.

The events that are 9/11 present the world with a particularly difficult political challenge, even if this challenge appears the most immediate for Muslims. Both the American establishment led by President Bush and militants of political Islam insist that Islam is a political, and not simply a religious or cultural, identity. Both are determined to distinguish between “good Muslims” and “bad Muslims,” so as to cultivate the former and target the latter. Should 9/11 and its aftermath caution us against reading a person’s politics from his or her culture and religion?

I know of no one inspired by Osama bin Laden for religious reasons. Bin Laden is a politician, not a theologian. Those who embrace him do so politically. Both Bush and bin Laden employ a religious language, the language of good and evil, the language of no compromise: you are either with us or against us. Both deny the possibility of a third response. For both, political loyalty comes before political independence. The danger of bringing notions of good and evil into politics cannot be underestimated. The consequence of bringing home—wherever home may be—the language of the war on terror should be clear: it will create a license to demonize adversaries as terrorists, clearing the ground for a fight to the finish, for with terrorists there can be no compromise. The result will be to displace attention from issues to loyalties, to criminalize dissent, and to invite domestic ruin. Worse still, if the struggle against political enemies is defined as a struggle against evil, it will turn into a holy war. And in holy war, there can be no compromise. Evil cannot be converted; it must be eliminated.

During the Cold War, small countries were tempted to line up for protection behind one or another international bully. Some in the Third World then tried to pioneer an alternative international order, one dedicated to two goals: to hold every bully accountable to minimal norms and to guarantee a share of justice to every historical victim. That initiative became identified with Bandung, the Indonesian town that hosted the friendship meeting of non-aligned states in the Cold War. With the Cold War over and the United States triumphantly walking the ring, thumping its chest, our most urgent need is to build on this legacy. If there is one lesson the Third World drew from its colonial past and defended during the Cold War, it was that there can be no independence without independent thought. In the weeks and months and years ahead, the first priority must be to defend that right to independent thought.

America promoted two different religious wars over the past quarter century, one in the course of the Cold War and the other after, one in Afghanistan and the other in Israel, one Islamist and the other Zionist. Today, both projects have been unleashed on a broader scale, one boomeranging on America, the other unfolding as part of official America’s global war on terror. Had the United States ended the Cold War with demilitarization and a peace dividend, 9/11 would not have happened. But the United States did not dismantle the global apparatus of empire at the end of the Cold War; instead, it concentrated on ensuring that hostile states—branded “rogue states”—did not acquire weapons of mass destruction that it already possessed, thereby raising the suspicion that its opposition was not to weapons of mass destruction but to their proliferation in hands it could neither control nor trust. Similarly, the United States did not accept responsibility for the militarization of civilian and state life in regions where the Cold War was waged with devastating consequences—as in Southeast Asia, southern Africa, Central America, and Central Asia. Instead, it walked away from responsibility. The Cold War came to an end with the subduing of one protagonist, the Soviet Union. Humanity is now left with a challenge: how to subdue and hold accountable the awesome power that the United States built up during the Cold War.

If state terror claims to be an exercise in maintaining law and order, societal terror presents itself as a fight for justice. I have stressed the importance of grasping the relation between the two: no Chinese wall divides “our” terrorism from “their” terrorism. Each tends to feed on the other. Whether domestic or international, terror has a political dimension. On April 19, 1995, a much-decorated American infantry soldier named Timothy McVeigh blew up a federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 innocent men, women, and children. In letters from jail, McVeigh indicated “that he had acted in retaliation for what had happened at Waco” two years earlier, when FBI agents had helped kill more than eighty members of a conservative Christian cult, of whom twenty-seven were children. Noting that Waco was “the largest massacre of Americans by their own government since 1890, when a number of Native Americans were slaughtered at Wounded Knee, South Dakota,” Gore Vidal, the American essayist, pointed out that McVeigh “even picked the second anniversary of the slaughter, April 19, for his act of retribution.” McVeigh remained silent throughout his trial, except for one statement when invited by the judge to speak before being sentenced to death. This is what he said: “I wish to use the words of Justice [Louis] Brandeis dissenting in
Olmstead
to speak for me. He wrote: ‘Our government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example.’”

Rather than explain away forms of societal terrorism as a racial or cultural affliction, “black-on-black” violence in Africa or “Islamic terrorism” globally, we need to understand that both forms of contemporary terror were forged in an environment of impunity created by state terror during the late Cold War. Rather than split “our” terrorism from “theirs”—only to excuse the former and demonize the latter, as with “good” and “bad” Muslims—we need to locate and understand both as part of a single historical process.

Before 9/11, the United States called for reconciliation in the face of societal terror. After 9/11, this stance was reversed. Instead of reconciliation, there is now a policy of zero tolerance and a demand for justice. When accompanied by a blanket refusal to deal with issues, the call for justice turns into a vendetta, the pursuit of revenge. In such a context, it is worth reflecting on the difference between law and violence. Against whom do we use the law and against whom violence? What is the point of distinguishing between two kinds of terrorists, Americans and non-Americans at some point, westerners and nonwesterners at other times? What is the point being made by the U.S. government when it ensures due process for Americans accused of terrorism, whether Timothy McVeigh or John Walker Lindh (the so-called American Taliban), but denies non-Americans and nonwesterners interned at Guan-tánamo Bay even the basic elements of due process, such as the right of habeas corpus and review by courts? The American government has invented a legal fiction for the purpose, calling the non-Americans “illegal combatants”; indeed, if they were to be considered prisoners of war, of the war on terror, then the relevant Geneva conventions would apply, making it a war crime for their captors to interrogate them or even to go beyond asking for identification. If to live by the rule of law is to belong to a common political community, then does not the selective application of the rule of law confirm a determination to relegate entire sections of humanity as conscripts of a civilization fit for collective punishment?

Finally, it is worth reflecting on the two adversaries in the war on terror: the United States and al-Qaeda. Both are veterans of the Cold War, in fact on the same side, and both have been marked indelibly by it. Both see the world through lenses of power. Both are informed by highly ideological worldviews, which each articulates in a highly religious political language, one that is self-righteous. The righteousness of self goes alongside the demonization of the other as evil. The point about ideological language, whether its idiom is religious or secular, is that it justifies the use of power with impunity. In the contest for power, each has eyes for none but the other. There is an eerie similarity between the American bombing of Iraq and Afghanistan and the al-Qaeda bombing of embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam and of the Twin Towers on 9/11: both testify that, when it comes to the contest for power, the rest of the world exists only as collateral.

This, however, is where the comparison must end, for the
moral
equivalence between the two does not translate into a
political
equivalence. There is no denying the global character of American power, before which the network known as al-Qaeda can only be described in the diminutive.

Caught in a situation where both adversaries in the war on terror claim to be fighting terror with weapons of terror, nothing less than a global movement for peace will save humanity. If we are to go by the lesson of the last global struggle for peace—that to end the war in Vietnam—this struggle, too, will have to be waged as a mass movement inside each country, particularly the democratic countries, and especially in the United States and Israel.

The era of proxy wars that began with America’s defeat in Vietnam closed with the invasion of Iraq. The open and unabashed invasion was based on two assumptions. Domestically, the Bush administration presented the invasion as a defensive move, a preemptive strike against an imminent threat to national security, a necessity in the post-9/11 era. At the same time, the neoconservative strategists of the Iraq invasion assured America and the world that the long-suffering people of Iraq would welcome American soldiers as a liberating force.

But the expected warm Iraqi embrace has not materialized. Instead of being hailed as an army of liberation, American soldiers have been treated as an occupation force. Faced with resistance, official America is already looking for allies—and proxies—in Iraq. Already, a new kind of proxy has been deployed in Iraq.
The Guardian
(London) reported that “while the official coalition figures list the British as the second largest contingent with around 9,900 troops, they are narrowly outnumbered by the 10,000 private military contractors now on the ground.” As a result, it calculated that “the proportion of contracted security personnel in the firing line is ten times greater than during the first Gulf War. In 1991, for every private contractor, there were 100 servicemen and women; now there are 10.” Of the $87 billion earmarked for the Iraqi campaign this year, the U.S. Army estimates that a third, nearly $30 billion, will be spent on contracts to private companies. To understand the kind of interests that drive this campaign, one needs to keep in mind a key advantage of privatizing war: it allows deployment to proceed “without the kind of congressional and media oversight to which conventional deployments are subject.”

At home, too, there is growing anxiety that the promised war on terror, a defensive national war, has metamorphosed into an offensive imperial war. The war agenda of the coalition of neo-conservatives and Christian fundamentalists in the Bush administration, dubbed a fight against “the axis of evil,” echoes the old Reaganite offensive against Third World nationalism. The neo-Reaganites defend this imperial endeavor as a disinterested global quest for democracy, for good against evil, for the time being reinforcing good Iraqis against bad, and good Muslims against bad. Like the Islamist radicals who would forever close “the gates of ijtihad,” the neo-Reaganite talk of “good” and “evil” closes the door to political reform. From a post-Cold War perspective, we can see how self-serving Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s two claims were: that there was a distinction between left-wing “totalitarian” and right-wing “authoritarian” regimes, and that whereas the latter could be reformed from within, the former would have to be forcibly overthrown from without. The fact is that left-wing regimes—from the Soviet Union to China—successfully reformed from within. The prerequisite was a defense of sovereignty and, in that context, the right to reform. In contrast, Iraq was not allowed to reform from within. If North Korea has escaped that same fate, could it be because it possesses weapons of mass destruction, which Iraq did not, and which provide the final guarantee of its right to reform?

But if the same Iraqis who yesterday welcomed the overthrow of Saddam Hussein today see American troops as an occupying force, is it not time to question the simplifying assumption that the problem lies with bad as opposed to good Iraqis? If good and bad Iraqis—and good and bad Muslims—are really quasi-official names for those who support and oppose American policies, is it not time to go beyond the name-calling and review policies that consistently seem to erode support and generate opposition? Whether in America, Iraq, or elsewhere, the revitalization of democracy in the era of globalized American power requires no less.